THE SPOILS OF BABYLON: Thursday 10PM on IFC – Change the Channel A lot of talent has been harnessed for IFC’s miniseries parody THE SPOILS OF BABYLON, starting with performer/producers Will Ferrell (whose Funny Or Die studio is behind the project), Tobey Maguire and Kristen Wiig, and including cast members Michael Sheen, Jessica Alba, […]
DEVIOUS MAIDS: Sunday 10PM on Lifetime The comic soap DEVIOUS MAIDS, based on a Mexican telenovela, overcame a slow start to become a solid performer for Lifetime last season, rising 50% in total viewers between its premiere and the season finale. With Army Wives done, Witches of East End only a modest success and […]
WITCHES OF EAST END: Sunday 9PM on Lifetime The marketing campaign for Season 2 of WITCHES OF EAST END has been working hard to create the impression of a darker, edgier show this time around. Apart from the odd decision to shoot most of the season premiere in semi-darkness, though, the series appears to […]
GIRLS: Sunday 9PM on HBO Watching the Season 4 premiere of GIRLS on the same night as this year’s Golden Globes was a reminder of how quickly things move in today’s pop culture from being state-of-the-art, cutting-edge phenomena to… if not yesterday’s news, certainly farther back from the Twitterverse heat than tonight’s winners Transparent […]
THE LAST SHIP: Sunday 9PM on TNT THE LAST SHIP was one of last summer’s biggest cable hits, taking a premise that was technically post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which most of the world has been annihilated by a plague, but staging it as a more or less contemporary military action adventure. That’s an approach, modeled […]
THE GOOD WIFE: Sunday 9PM on CBS In the wasteland of this fall’s collection of lackluster network programming, THE GOOD WIFE is starting to seem less like an exception and more like a miracle. (Even more so, since it lives on CBS.) Robert and Michelle King’s series eased into its 7th season tonight as […]
GIRLS: Sunday 10PM on HBO We now know that the 6th and next season of Lena Dunham’s GIRLS will be its last, and the Season 5 premiere made clear that Dunham has little intention of making the show less polarizing than it’s been from the start. The episode, written and directed by Dunham, used […]
VICE PRINCIPALS: Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride. For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]